ABNA24 - The Sunday night security incident in Washington at the dinner ceremony of the White House for the journalists and Trump which was described by the FBI an assassination plot has drawn major reactions and it keeps hitting the news headlines.
Certainly, one of the key dimensions of this incident was the way propaganda machine of the US dealt with the case and the way Trump took political advantage of this incident.
There is no doubt that Trump is now a despised or at least unpopular figure among the Americans who are strongly opposed to his views and home and foreign policy, his defiance of democratic processes, his repeated lies, and now economic challenges stirred by his fruitless warmongering policies.
According to polls, he even does not have the popularity of the last year and ranks among the most unpopular presidents in the US, something he calls "Trump Derangement Syndrome" to frame himself as a victim of an organized media propaganda campaign led by the globalist deep state and radical left.
Sociologists suggest this approach is the Trumpist mechanism for re-polarizing society and stoking violence across social strata, all to fuel his political ambitions in the struggle for power. The outcome is clear: Today's US faces far deeper and more radical political and social fault lines than it did before 2017.
Now, just as he has always responded to criticism of his policies and views, Trump is treating the narratives around the assassination attempt as political gold, lifeline to ease pressure and rehabilitate his standing with the public. So much so that one could argue such incidents do not worry him at all about unleashing public anger over his policies; he is not even reluctant to see them happen.
In fact, if the failed 2024 assassination attempt served as a high-speed elevator back to the White House at the height of the election campaign, this time it is clearly his rope ladder out of a quagmire of troubles.
Only three months after the day Trump met the journalists at the White House with hands full of economic figures and data he bragged about as wonderful in his one year as a president in his second term, the Sunday night meeting was totally a frustration. Impacted by war, there were no news of positive economic performance nor an atmosphere of excitement for repeating the announcement of the American "fast, resolute, and low-cost" victory in Venezuelan this time in Iran.
Iran has neither lost the war nor seen its government change, despite Trump's claims. Instead, thanks to the White House's miscalculation, Tehran has unveiled a new equation on the battlefield and in diplomacy, by controlling the Strait of Hormuz. Fuel prices at gas stations across the US have skyrocketed. Financial markets have suffered massive losses. And with no clear White House strategy to exit this costly war, opposition to continued fighting and public anger over Trump's broken promises are growing by the day. If this trend holds, Republicans are not just failing to boost their chances of holding Congress, but also they are now risking a potential landslide defeat to Democrats in the October midterms and the 2028 presidential race.
Trump, whom many critics believe waged the war on Iran to escape the fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal, diverting public and media attention away from demands to unearth classified files in that case, will likely face an even heavier reckoning if he loses the war with Iran. Once the war ends, public focus will snap back to the Epstein case, along with Trump's role in that sordid affair.
In such a predicament, the assassination incident is precisely what Trump desperate needs to get out of this critical condition. In other words, the shooter emerged not as a factor of danger but a savior.
As it was expected, Trump in person and like a crime journalist published the first image and identity of the shooter on TruthSocial, his personal social media platform. He then rushed to hold a press conference and described himself among the biggest presidents of the US, stating that he is "honoured" because "they [plotters] go after the people that make the biggest impact," comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln.
Without any preliminary investigation, or even a nod to the intelligence community's assessments, he immediately floated the possibility that the incident was linked to the war with Iran, then insisted it would have no impact on his ongoing "maximum pressure" campaign, a repeat of the public-unaccepted stance that he scored a big win against Iran.
The incident was so clear-cut that now many political observers and social media users label it as a "false flag" plot. Either this is an attempted assassination plot or a false flag one, it does not seem Trump this time can mobilize his supporter base to realize his intended political agenda, especially to assuage the anger about starting a new war, though the incident remains a powerful propaganda instrument available to Trump to attack the Democrats and further polarize the American society.
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